An agitated patient was stomping around the psychiatrist's office, running his hands through his hair, almost in tears.
"Doctor, my memory's gone. Gone! I can't remember my wife's name. Can't remember my children's names. Can't remember what kind of car I drive. Can't remember where I work. It was all I could do to find my way here."
"Calm down. How long have you been like this?"
"Like what?"
Galvani's electric fluidIn 1780, Luigi Galvani recorded, "The electric fluid should be considered a means to the nervo-muscular force." He reached this conclusion from work in his laboratory in Bologna, Italy, after a series of experiments and his accidental discovery that muscles are operated by electrical stimulation of nerves. He worked diligently along these lines, but waited for eleven years before he published the results and an ingenious and simple theory. His theory was that of a nervous electric fluid, secreted by the brain, conducted by the nerves, and stored in the muscles. Though his ideas were abandoned by scientists on account of later discoveries, his work opened the way to new research in the physiology of muscle and nerve and pioneered the subject of electrophysiology. |
